Visual Pop-out

Visual Pop-out

Visual “pop-out” occurs when a unique visual target (e.g. a feature singleton) is present among a set of homogeneous distractors (source: Hsieh et al., 2011)

Example: Adaptive tool-bar highlights things that they used before

Assuming the system is pretty good at predicting what you need next, this is a very effective feature

The problem is that when things are highlighted to help people find things they had used before, the next time people looked for a tool they wanted to use they skipped over highlighted tools because before the tool they were looking for was not highlighted

Summary: Visual Pop-Outs only work if you know what to look for! If you are primed to look for it, you will find it, if not you will ignore it